About this item
A raw, edgy, yet intimate new voice from the front lines in Iraq-the most authentic we have had yet from the war, heralding this generations Catch-22. Like many of his generation, Colby Buzzell was jumping from one dead-end job to another, a paycheck away from moving back home. He spent his time skateboarding and killing as many brain cells as humanly possible. Tired of the monotony, he found himself in front of an army recruiter. Within months he was in Iraq, a machine gunner in the controversial Stryker Brigade Combat Team, an army unit on the cutting edge of combat technology, and the first of its kind. This is the startlingly honest story of a young man and a war. Trapped amid guerilla warfare, urban-style in Mosul, Iraq, Buzzell was struck by the bizarre, absurd, often frightening world surrounding him.
About the Author
Colby Buzzell is the author of My War: Killing Time in Iraq and served as an infantryman in the United States Army during the Iraq War. Assigned to a Stryker Brigade Combat Team in 2003, Buzzell blogged from the front lines of Iraq as a replacement for his habitual journaling back in the states. In 2004 Buzzell was profiled in Esquire's "Best and Brightest" issue and has since contributed frequently to the magazine. The Washington Post referred to his article "Digging a Hole All the Way to America" as "A Tour de Force Travelogue," and his article "Down & Out In Fresno and San Francisco" was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2010. His work has also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and on This American Life. He currently lives in San Francisco, California, and has no plans whatsoever of staying there.My War: Killing Time In Iraq"My War by Colby Buzzell is nothing less than the soul of an extremely interesting human being at war on our behalf in Iraq."- Kurt Vonnegut"I remember reading Colby's journal entries on the internet when he was filing them from Iraq. I was amazed at how heavy the material was but what really knocked me out was how sharp and vividly intense his writing was. My War is the real deal reportage from the ground. There's no way any reporter could have brought this back. If you care about our brave soldiers in the fray and want to get an insight into what it's really like out there, My War is essential reading."- Henry Rollins"Endlessly surprising...delightfully profane... an unfiltered, often ferocious expression of his boots-on-the-ground point-of-view of the Iraq war."- Arianna Huffington"If, in 20 years time, people want to know what it was like to fight in Iraq, they can pick up 'My War' and find out. It tells what it's like to be a grunt fighting in the Sunni Triangle - with more power and authority than the best 'embedded reporter' could manage. It is something of a triumph for blogs over traditional media."- Nick Cohen"My War is breathtaking. His self-awareness is total and unromantic, his instinct for what matters unrelenting, his writing lyrical, heartbreaking, hilarious, and essential. We can read a thousand dispatches from Iraq, but we will never know the war-or ourselves-like we will after reading My War."-Robert Kurson, author of Shadow Divers"Incredible accounts of combat from a grunt's-eye-view."-Rolling Stone Magazine"The most extraordinary writing yet produced by a soldier of the Iraq war"-Esquire Magazine"My War is perhaps the finest and most genuine writing to come so far out of the war in Iraq, uncompromising in both its criticism and its praise, willing to admit the ugliness of violence and the exhilaration that it breeds."-War, Literature & the Arts Journal"Buzzell's account of military life as a grunt in Mosul, My W
